27 Şubat 2008 Çarşamba

Mobile Ringtone Business and who benefits?!

The Mobile phone Industry has evolved drastically over the past few years. When the first cell phones rolled into the market in the 1990s, nobody ever expected that those bulky boxes would develop into sleek, beautiful and powerful machines that could (aside from sending and receiving calls) take a picture, make a video, and sing. Initially a technological wonder to connect with people to a sophisticated device effectively a part of your personality! What brought about this change? And who does it really benefit?

The answer to the first question would be the outburst of the personalisation trend and the changing consumerist demands. Ringtone Industry is a humungous industry for the simple reason that it allows you to make your mobile sing your favourite song when someone remembers you. A mobile phone with its contents has the ability to make you laugh, cry, happy, sad, nostalgic and a lot more whenever you want it to. Although this wasn’t the case a few years back.

So how did it all start? The Ringtone syndrome!! Free Ringtones are readily available on the web and this has led to an increase in personalisation. This desire to personalise mobile phones has established the present success of the mobile Industry. Today, when the marketing gurus see this impact of the Mobile industry on the masses, they take advantage of it. Many companies start to advertise their campaigns through mobile phones. Whether it is text messages to promote products and services or direct advertising through mobile music or ring tones, the rise in the number of mobile content providers reflects the success of many such advertising strategies.

The Music Industry also benefits significantly. Statistics prove that mobile music downloads is growing by over 50 per cent every year. Artists become famous in the process. Musicians supplement their incomes and record companies celebrate at the revenue source.

Mobile ringtones have in fact opened up a whole new revenue stream for record labels struggling with falling revenues and piracy. Many experts believe that in certain ringtone heavy markets, record labels will sign up artists with the objective of generating revenues only from mobile content. Other avenues would become secondary to it. The same holds true for the movie industry. Content like ringtones, wallpapers, ringback tones based on films is a huge draw and is today a large part of revenue forecast plans of movie studios.

The mobile content has also spurred a whole new content industry, several small and medium enterprises have been set up to develop content specifically for the mobile phone platform.

At the centre of this axis is the telecom carrier, who takes a significant share of revenue for each mobile content download. Telecom carriers too have set up separate mobile content / VAS divisions to harness the revenue potential of the medium.

The mobile ring tone industry has its own ecosystem, with each player drawing its share of revenue from every ring tone that gets downloaded by the user.

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